Jones was found dead on July 26, she had been arrested for a fight with her husband outside a bar two days prior.
On Wednesday, officials revealed that a discrepancy was discovered in her prisoner log and she may have been overly medicated. The prisoner log shows that she was given medications twice in 24 hours, while the jail log notes that drugs were given to her three times.
"We note that the Medical Log Sheet reflects fewer medications dispensed to Ms. Jones than documented in the Jail Log," a statement from the office of Elizabeth Rothenberg, director of law for the City of Cleveland Heights read. "This matter is under investigation along with the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's investigation of the cause of Ms. Jones's death."
The medications Jones was taking were atenolol (blood pressure), gabapentin (anti-epileptic), escitalopram (anti-anxiety), sumatripitan (migraine), oxycodone (pain), and zolpidem (sedative).
According to a pharmaceutical professor who spoke to NBC, it is possible that this irresponsible oversight could have proven deadly.
"The escitalopram here, it looks like she was given it twice — in the morning at 10:43 and also in the evening time and that's a once a day drug," Dr. Jeannie Lee, an associate pharmacy professor from the University of Arizona, told NBC. "So I'm wondering why she's taking it twice a day. That's another one of my concerns that particular medication because of the interactions, we probably want her on the lower side of the dose, which she's on 20 mg, but this particular day she received 40, it looks like.”
"So there are potential drug interactions that are present there, especially escitalopram and sumatriptan which is a migraine medication, so, she had several medications that basically work on the serotonin receptors in the brain and if you take multiple medications that stimulate serotonin in the brain, that can cause overstimulation and what we call serotonin syndrome — it's a possibility," she said.
Jones’ death, which came during a string of black women mysteriously dying in a police custody, remains under investigation by Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office.
